American Terrorist Trilogy

by Jeffrey Poston

  “I am trained, Aaron.” He gazed at his nemesis. “I was trained by the best in the business.” He took a deep breath, then changed the subject. “How are Special Agent Cummings and her daughter?”

  “Their injuries were…psychological.” He paused. “With treatment, they should recover in time.”

  Carl nodded and looked away. “Anita?”

  McGrath paused for a long time, and Carl knew the man was fighting the same internal emotional battle he was.

  “She’s alive.” McGrath fell silent for a while, then he said, “You took a bullet for Melissa.” Carl nodded. “Shirley is very grateful. As am I.”

  “It’s what we do for our kids...when we are able.”

  “You brought her back even after you learned I’m her father.”

  “You were not the mission, Aaron.” Carl gazed at the man. “The mission was to save the girl.”

  An eerie silence settled around the two men. The only sound Carl could hear was the low drone of the army helicopter idling in the distance.

  “Proceed with the new mission when you are ready, Mr. Johnson.”

  Carl looked to the south. “I’m ready now.”

  “Good hunting.”

  TO BE CONTINUED...

  CONTAGION

  (American Terrorist 2)

  a thriller

  Jeffrey Poston

  Lomas & Turner Press

  Contagion (American Terrorist 2)

  By Jeffrey Poston

  Copyright © 2014 by Jeffrey Poston, Lomas & Turner Press

  For more about this author please visit

  http://www.JeffreyPostonBooks.com

  All characters and events in this eBook, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  Editing by Debra L Hartmann, The Pro Book Editor

  Cover art and design by Deanna Dionne

  Interior design by IAPS.rocks

  Main category—Fiction>Thrillers

  Other category—Fiction>Political, Espionage, Terrorism

  “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

  –Friedrich Nietzsche

  Chapter 1

  Albuquerque, NM

  FBI Special Agent Lenore Cummings awoke with a gasp. She lay perfectly still on her back as she tried to process what had snatched her away from the nightmare. Her nerves were wired and her body trembled. She hugged her blanket up under her chin and took a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and then blew it out slowly.

  She hated this part of herself for feeling so vulnerable and afraid. A highly trained federal agent, she could go hand-to-hand with any man on the planet and win against all but the best elite soldiers. She’d been trained to endure the harshest environments on earth and survive, and was a rated expert at nearly a dozen different weapons. Yet, none of that training could conquer the fear that had nearly paralyzed her for almost a week since her ordeal.

  “Recovery is going to be a long, hard road,” they said. “There will be good days and bad,” they said. “You have to get back in the mix,” they said. She’d dealt with many victims over the years, so she already knew that. But still the shrinks reinforcing it had made it real to her on a personal level.

  They said you can’t return to your old life after being victimized. They said even professionals need treatment after an event such as what she’d suffered through. Professionals were not immune to post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s why she’d been put on administrative leave pending evaluation.

  The mental torment was crippling her, so she could only wonder what her daughter was feeling. Lisette had been victimized by the same man. The man that she so desperately wanted to kill. The man that now totally dominated her mind, every minute of every day. He entered her dreams every night and tortured her again and again. It was the same nightmare every night, the same tears every time she awoke from that nightmare, because she wasn’t strong enough to push him out of her mind.

  He was Carl Johnson, the man known to the entire world as the American Terrorist. Lenore let out the cry of anguish she’d been holding inside and rolled onto her right side. How Johnson managed to make her wake up lying on her back after every nightmare was a mystery to her.

  The exterior street lights played through the branches of trees swaying in the wind in her front yard, causing obscene shadows to move along her walls. Too often those shadows looked like a dark outline of Carl Johnson. A few nights ago, she’d hung blackout drapes to keep the man out of her room and out of her dreams. She hated herself for hanging those, too, but the shadows scared her the most.

  Even with her eyes closed she could see Johnson’s face as clear as day, hovering over her. He had her tied to the gurney on her back, with her hands restrained over her head and her legs spread. She’d been helpless and vulnerable, and now was just as powerless in her recurring nightmares a week later. He had leered at her, his brown eyes totally devoid of all emotion except hatred, drinking up her nakedness. And he had touched her. He still touched her. Every night. In the nightmares.

  He hadn’t raped her, though he could have. He didn’t need to. His purpose hadn’t been sexual assault. He only wanted to break her will, to make her betray her fellow government agents. And betray them she had, but not because of what Johnson did to her. It was what he threatened to do to her daughter that instantly destroyed her ability to resist or fight.

  Lisette had been similarly tied to another gurney next to hers, and Lenore had absolutely zero doubt that the man would kill her daughter in retribution. He held Cummings directly responsible for his son’s murder, and there was nothing she could say that would change that belief. In truth, Lenore knew she was directly responsible for Mark Johnson’s death. She hated that she felt deserving of her fate.

  The terrorist had told her in explicit detail what he was going to do to the eleven-year-old girl before he killed her. She’d seen in his eyes his wish that she would not cooperate. That’s how much the man wanted to kill her child as payback. He even said he was going to let Lenore live so she’d feel what he felt—the loss of a child—for the rest of her life.

  So she broke. She cried, begged, and pleaded. She told the man everything he wanted to know. It was the only way to save her daughter.

  That was why she hated herself. Because he broke her. Because she couldn’t protect her child. Because she allowed the man to repeatedly violate her mind night after night.

  She opened her eyes and examined the only source of light in the dark room. The dim face of the digital clock read a little after one in the morning. Usually, she awoke around four; too early to get up, yet too late to go back to sleep. Now she wondered what had awakened her earlier than normal. She remembered hearing some kind of sound.

  A primordial sense of awareness that might have been hard-wired into the human DNA tingled down her spine and informed her she was not alone in her room. She smelled man-scent—a musky odor born of sweat and bad breath. The impossible thought that Carl Johnson would come after her a second time and actually be bold enough to sneak into her house froze her for half a second.

  Then, she realized a second fact.

  Someone is moving upstairs!

&nbs
p; The slight creaking of the wood floor wasn’t the result of the quick patter of a pre-teen girl walking down the hall to the bathroom or coming down the stairs to climb into mom’s bed. The motion was slow and deliberate. Heavy. A man was moving upstairs, trying not to make any noise. Lenore knew her old house intimately, and she could tell the man was creeping, not quite stealthily, from the top of the stairs toward her daughter’s room. She heard another creak from above. Someone else was moving up there, in her mother’s room across the hall from Lisette’s room.

  Lenore threw her blanket off and reached for her service weapon on the nightstand beside the digital clock. She had barely wrapped her fingers around the square pistol grip when she froze at a metallic click that resounded through the utter silence of her bedroom.

  “I wouldn’t do that, Agent.” Not miss, not ma’am, but agent. The man in her room knew exactly who she was. He knew what her capabilities were.

  The voice was deep, almost baritone, but it was not the voice she remembered from her nightmares or from her torturous ordeal last week. It was not Carl Johnson.

  For a fraction of a second, Lenore wondered if she could roll off the far side of the bed and simply fire quick shots at the invader. She realized the metallic sound was the man disengaging his safety. He was ready and would shoot first. Even if she managed to shoot at the same instant, her mattress would be no kind of barrier to his bullets, especially if he was armed, as she suspected, with an automatic assault rifle. Even if she killed the man in her room, she’d never get upstairs fast enough to save her daughter.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Now turn on your bedside lamp and keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Lenore knew instantly the intruder could see in the dark. He had to be wearing some kind of night vision device. No other way he could know she’d been reaching for her weapon or that there was a lamp on a nightstand beside the bed.

  She did as she was told and light flared into the room. The appearance of the man surprised her. He was a big guy, well over six feet tall, and was decked out from head to toe in full tactical gear. He dropped his left hand from his head, and she knew he had just lifted a night-vision monocular from his right eye.

  The man’s black face—or maybe it was a white face hidden behind black camouflage paint—matched the darkness of his tactical gear, and he wore clear acrylic combat goggles. The goggles were the bubble wrap-around kind that allowed clear peripheral vision while protecting from hot shell casings or splinters flying around during a firefight, or pepper spray in the hands of a panicked civilian.

  The man wore a black combat helmet and black body armor and held a wicked-looking MP5. It wasn’t the civilian semi-automatic knockoff fancied by hunters or militiamen or mercenaries employed by third-world dictatorships. This man’s weapon was the real deal. It was the easy-to-use, easy-to-maintain, highly reliable and extremely accurate nine-millimeter Machine Pistol model 5, from the translation of the name given to the weapon by the German company that manufactured it. It was military grade weaponry, like the rest of his gear, unavailable on the civilian market. He was a US soldier or a private contractor funded and equipped by the US military.

  The man took two steps to his left, keeping the business end of his assault rifle pointed at her midsection. “Now we wait,” he said.

  She didn’t have to wait long, for the apparition that tormented her every night suddenly stepped into the doorway.

  Lenore gasped. The terrorist had finally come back for her, but she couldn’t imagine why. He’d already won. He broke her and her superiors knew it from her after-action report.

  The FBI shrink said she needed time off to recover, but she knew the truth was that she was being evaluated to see if she was still psychologically and emotionally fit for duty. After all, she’d been captured and tortured. That wasn’t something most law enforcement officers could ever fully recover from.

  Now here he was, standing in her bedroom doorway.

  “You!” Lenore looked from Carl Johnson to the armed intruder and back again and said, “Please, leave my daughter out of this.”

  The armed intruder chuckled. “Like I’m going to fall for that trick?”

  Carl Johnson, who had approached the doorway out of view from the armed man, said, “You should have.”

  Lenore sat on her bed stunned as her torturer raised a silenced pistol and shot the man in the neck just below his armored Kevlar helmet. The bullet passed through the man’s spine and thumped into the wall with very minimal blood splatter. The commando collapsed where he’d stood.

  Carl disappeared and Lenore heard him pounding up the stairs as she leaped from her bed and grabbed the dead man’s MP5. The safety was already off, so she ran into the hallway holding the automatic weapon with her right hand and the lower part of her cotton nightgown with her left.

  What the hell is happening?

  The terrorist who had kidnapped her and nearly tortured her child—the man she had sworn to kill if she ever saw him again—was in her house and had just saved her life.

  Lenore heard a scuffle come from her daughter’s room, along with a confused shout and another muffled gunshot. Though the shot was suppressed, the sound echoed through the quiet house like a loud clap. She stopped at the foot of the stairs and gazed upward as Johnson emerged at the top of the stairs with her daughter, Lisette, trailing in his grasp.

  Lenore brought up her weapon and aimed at the terrorist as the thought entered her mind that maybe he hadn’t saved her at all. Maybe he just needed to eliminate the other intruders first. Maybe the men were TER agents, elite operators from the classified Terror Event Response agency. Maybe they were here for him. Maybe she was just bait.

  Still, if any of that was true, then Carl Johnson should have killed Lenore. He knew better than anyone not to leave her alive in a situation where she could arm herself.

  She was just about to shout at Johnson to release Lisette, when she saw a shadow move from the darkened doorway of her mother’s room. She screamed as the shadow raised an assault rifle and aimed, not at her and not at Johnson, but at her daughter.

  A fraction of a second later and directly behind her, the front door exploded off its hinges and Lenore was knocked off her feet by the blast. Her weapon slid across the hall’s wood floor. Through a foggy haze, Lenore saw more shadowy figures enter the doorway. They were all clad in black combat gear just like the first intruder. One aimed a sleek P90 at her and fired at point blank range.

  But he missed.

  Chapter 2

  Two Days Previous—1000 hours EST Thursday

  Washington, DC

  August Spoke opened his eyes with the first chime of his cell phone. It took him nearly a second to remember where he was. He lay on his back and the woman, Cynthia Manford, lay half beside him and half on top of him. She purred but did not wake up as he reached out his right hand for the glowing faceplate of the cell on the bedside table.

  His mental clock told him it was mid-morning, but the room in which he slept was dark. He recalled his new girlfriend’s obsession with blackout curtains in the bedroom. She was absolutely the most beautiful woman Spoke had ever dated. She was stunning with her tall and slender, yet curvy, physique. She had dark brown skin, worked out every day, and ate excessively healthy. She had a perfect face to match her perfect body, yet she considered herself ugly.

  That, Spoke thought, is the true reason for the blackout curtains. Maybe she has a scar or a disfigurement and doesn’t want anyone to see it. Women. Never satisfied with themselves.

  He brought the cell up to his face and saw the familiar number. He flipped the phone open and whispered, “One minute.” He snapped the cell closed. He knew the caller would not talk on an unsecured phone line. The call was merely a notification that Spoke was needed.

  He slid from under the woman and the sheets, then felt on the bedside table for his pocket pouch. He found the tiny cloth pouch and palmed it, pausing a moment to orient himself in the da
rkness. Then he remembered where the bathroom was and went there. He closed the door behind him and opened the pouch, sliding out a single item. It was a tiny earpiece designed for secure satellite communications.

  Spoke turned on the faucet to provide a background noise shield against eavesdroppers—one never knew who was listening in his line of work—and fitted the device into his left ear. He activated the comm channel with a light press of his index finger. The device had no dialer as it only connected to a single channel owned by one man.

  “Rainman,” came the instant reply. “Are you secure?”

  Spoke said, “I am.”

  “Good. The operation is a go. The girl has just been delivered from Mexico. We will now move to the second phase. I would advise you to call in sick for a few days. On your next assignments, touch nothing and no one. Always wear gloves. Understood?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “You are to proceed with total operational security.”

  In other words, kill anyone who can be linked to me.

  Spoke glanced at the bathroom door, dimly lit by a nightlight. Operational security included sterilizing his new girlfriend. He knew Rainman didn’t waste words or time with the obvious, so he waited patiently for the other shoe to drop.

  “But we have a problem,” Rainman said.

  Of course you do. That’s why you called me.

  “Specify,” he said.

  “There is a man, an intern for the president’s chief of staff, who has uncovered some evidence.”

  Evidence. For August Spoke that word carried many connotations, all of them bad. Evidence meant Rainman’s plan had potentially been discovered. Evidence meant someone had to die. Evidence meant Spoke had to kill again. Eventually, the killing would evolve into a pattern that would itself yield more evidence, which then fed into more killing.